I’d love to have a slightly wider variety of ThinkPad keyboards to test fit. I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t been able to find a good reference that lets me know exactly how big each ThinkPad Keyboard is in width, height, and thickness so that we could more easily screen candidates. My one constraint has been that I want the trackpoint buttons to be integral to the keyboard, since I don’t want to have to fabricate new buttons to replace them, but other than that I am mostly throwing darts. I picked the X1 Carbon Gen 10 because it was the most recent keyboard I could find (thus likely to be available longer and be thinner) that had integral trackpoint buttons.
But if folks wanted to help out, chipping in to buy a few more keyboard candidates would be useful. I’ve made a friend in the Batch 1 Guild so I’ll get a chance to test fit whatever I have against a real FW16 and check to see whether the keyboard fits well, clears the various obstructions, etc – there are posts on the FW16 midplate used for aligning input modules, and a channel that provides some extra depth, and on the keyboard side there are sometimes mounting lugs or extra bits of depth at various points. Anyway, the best way to be sure (absent a library of engineering drawings from Lenovo) is to hold up a keyboard against the real thing and see how it fits, but at $20-$50 a keyboard, that can get pricey fast. So I’d gratefully accept keyboard donations if folks wanted to help out that way (they’re easy to find on Amazon and eBay), albeit with no guarantee that your contribution will end up being “the one”.
If you’re interested, PM me on the forum. If there’s huge interest it might be worth setting up a GitHub sponsors or something, but if it’s just one or two I just might give you my postal address and have you send stuff my way.